History of hypocrisy on uranium

Robin Gerster

It's a sorry tale, and the Labor Party in particular can't seem to sort out its moral and intellectual confusion.

That the Australian government has covertly canvassed the prospect of selling its uranium to India made an arresting headline. But it came as no surprise to those who have noted the recent rebirth of Australian uranium mining. Long hamstrung by restrictive policies, the business is on the go in a manner reminiscent of its halcyon days in the 1950s, when the ''modern Midas metal'', as it was called, was to the developing postwar nation what gold was to colonial Australia.

What the WikiLeak does highlight is the history of hypocrisy in Australia's policy on the associated matter of uranium and nuclear power, especially when the governing party has been the ALP, which struggles to resolve its moral and intellectual confusion.

In a recent book, Helen Caldicott takes a caustic view of her country's trade in the nuclear element. ''Australia is like a heroin pusher,'' she writes, ''pushing its immoral raw material upon a world that is hungry for energy.'' It is an unpleasant analogy from an implacable hater of nuclear power, who is not exactly known for understatement. But it does suggest an unpleasant truth. Australian remains defiantly - some might say complacently - ''nuclear free''. Yet it is happy to export its product to numerous countries in Asia and Europe.

Conditions for sale are strict: it is explicitly for use in civilian reactors. But the likelihood is that Australian uranium has found its way into nuclear weapons, clandestinely or otherwise.

The government publicly says it refuses to supply India, an old ally, on the basis that India hasn't signed the nuclear non-proliferation treaty. That makes Australia appear to be a responsible uranium merchant, but it blithely ignores geopolitical pressures. Nor is it historically consistent. France hadn't signed the treaty either, back in the 1980s, but the Hawke government continued to sell France uranium, even though French nuclear testing in Australia's Pacific backyard caused widespread outrage.

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At the same time as it refuses India, Australia sells China vast quantities of the material to help fuel its colossal industrial growth. Those cynics who resent Australia turning itself into one big quarry smell a rat: after all, our prosperity depends in large part on being a compliant and trusted dealer in raw materials to China.

Having dispensed with the party's ''three mines policy'', the Labor government is taking a broad view of who should be allowed into the industry. The recently approved Honeymoon mine in South Australia is operated by a Canadian company in partnership with the Japanese trading giant Mitsui. Foreign concerns such as Canada's ''Mega Uranium Ltd'' and Chinese state-owned enterprises have been welcomed into the market.

One of the players, at least, has alarming connections. The Honeymoon mine was approved soon after a tick was given to another mine at a place called Four Mile, in the northern Flinders Ranges, owned by Heathgate Resources, which also runs the big Beverley uranium facility nearby. Heathgate is a fully owned subsidiary of the US multinational General Atomics, whose interests in developing nuclear technologies include arms manufacture: its Predator unmanned aircraft, now upgraded to carry air-to-surface missiles, played a significant role in Iraq and currently in Afghanistan.

For those of us old enough to remember the anti-uranium campaigns of the 1970s, '80s and '90s, the lamentable irony is that it was the one-time no-nukes warrior Peter Garrett who, as environment minister, gave the new enterprises at Honeymoon and Four Mile the green light. In the song The Dead Heart, Garrett, as the frontman for Midnight Oil, had railed against ''mining companies, pastoral companies, uranium companies''. Now Garrett was sporting a suit and giving those companies, foreign companies no less, the go-ahead to dig up the stuff at their pleasure.

In Australia, the tortured debates about the pros and cons of nuclear energy tend to be built on absolute and universal propositions that cannot be reconciled: it will either ameliorate the climate change that is destroying the planet, or it will kill us all. But perhaps the main source of unease lies much closer to home: the land rights and cultural sensibilities of Aborigines, the people of ''true country'' as Garrett called them in The Dead Heart.

Native title legislation, largely sponsored by Labor governments, has forced mining companies into negotiation with indigenous groups, which have scored a few isolated wins. But not many, and often too late.

In 1992, the activist Joan Wingfield, a member of the Kokotha people whose tribal lands include BHP Billiton's gargantuan uranium-copper-gold underground Olympic Dam mine, at Roxby Downs in South Australia, told an eloquent story of desecration. At the mine, the so-called ''Whenan Shaft'' takes the miners down into the earth, and brings the ore back up to the surface. That shaft, Wingfield explains, cuts right through the stomach of a lizard in one of the local dreaming stories of her people. How would Wingfield react, now, to the news that BHP plans to extend the mine's output threefold by gouging an open-cut hole the size of Sydney Harbour and one kilometre deep, fringed by mullock heaps hundreds of feet high?

The guilty debate about digging up and shipping out uranium will rumble on long after Australia reverses it decision on sales to India, as appears likely, and embraces its own nuclear-powered future.

Robin Gerster is a professor in the school of English, communications and performance studies at Monash University. He is researching a history of Australian nuclear culture.